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Testing Out AMD's DRI2 Driver Stack

Phoronix: Testing Out AMD's DRI2 Driver Stack

For as long as I can recall, ATI/AMD video cards have typically had decent support in Linux. It's not hard to pick out points in time where drivers were slow to come (R300 sticks out in my mind), but that was not due to the lack of effort by the open-source community as it was the difficulty reverse engineering a chip with no documentation. Intel seems to be the one getting most of the press these days regarding their open-source graphics support, but AMD is putting forth its own notable effort as well. They have multiple full time employees working on open-source support and have released specifications and programming documentation for their entire range of chips. The past few months have seen a flurry of activity in graphics related development, and a fair amount of this is centered around AMD hardware.

Great article Michael. I like how you interpreted it as more of a "work in progress" rather than bashing its current regressions. I think a follow-up article on a new release would be awesome! (maybe you could use the same graphs as in this article to compare this dri2 version).

"For as long as I can recall, ATI/AMD video cards have typically had decent support in Linux."

Are you serious? Just a few years ago ATI cards were a _huge_ no-no for anybody wanting to use linux. 2D performance with the fglrx driver was complete crap IIRC; I had a Radeon 9500 (non-Pro) that was almost unusable in Linux due to the poor performance of the fglrx driver (and radeon had no 3D support, not to mention that 2D performance wasn't much better either). Let's face it, both Intel and Nvidia have far better places in the linux support category, even though Intel produces low 3D performance graphics cards.

What does decent linux support mean? That they did have some crappy drivers out there? That's not decent IMHO.

Even the binaries were "usable". I remember running my old 9800 and 9600 cards on the old drivers; performance was lacking, but they got the job done. I honestly could never understand what all the fuss was about with ATI drivers even back then.